Three's Noiry, too!
by Duo Himura
Summary: A certain someone never died. Three certain someones decided--after some begging--to live together. So it's basically Noir: The Sitcom, but with more sex and attempts to murder the hypotenuse. And a rather frustrated Kirika in the middle. Non-explicit
1. Love TrianglER

_Author's Note: This isn't How the God Generals Replicated Christmas Chapter 5. I know. That is coming. This was a random idea that sprang into my head, which I pounded out yesterday on a whim, so at the very least it's not as though it's keeping me from finishing my more important fanfic obligations (I have other things to do that). _

_Anyway, Julia, ever my co-conspirator, lent me Noir. This was probably a mistake, as after watching it, I become very attached to the idea of fandubbing it ala Yu-Gi-Oh! the Abridged Series (look forward to it… eventually, though probably under a moderately more original title like "Noir: To Make a Long Story Short."). Yes, I realize that Noir is… not easy to make seem completely silly, but damned if I'm not going to try. _

_Long story short (wow I only noticed that in retrospect), I mentioned how in said parody, there ought to be a line about how the whole thing with Chloe could be resolved via a threesome. I asked Julia if she'd ship _that_ (since she doesn't ship KirikaxMireille due to hatred of Mireille), she said maybe, I said "Wow that would make a beautiful crackfic," and here we are. I realize there's already a fic of this nature (at least one) by the name of "Just the Three of Us," but I feel like different people can tackle the same idea in fairly different ways. Also that fic hasn't updated in about a year (though I of all people should probably know how little that means). So, I guess I'll just have to be careful not to rip it off._

_Disclaimer: I don't own Noir, I'm just using it for my own pleas—er… strictly comedic purposes. _

_This fic is rated T… tentatively. I doubt there'll ever be anything graphic, but there is a level of innuendo that may go a bit far… And you never know. Anyway, enjoy!_

**Three's Noir-y, Too  
****A Crackfic of the Highest Caliber  
By Duo Himura**

Come and break down our door  
We've been waiting for you  
With guns that are hers (Mireille) and hers (Kirika) and hers (Chloe: knives!)  
Three's Noir-y too!

Come and step on our floor  
There's a landmine or two.  
We've a loveable space that needs your face  
But not the rest of you!

You'll see that life(1) is a ball again  
Mireille might fall again(2), too…  
Down at our rendezvous  
Assassins waiting for you!

Instrumental (have some notes(3))

(1) read: Wanton destruction and violence  
(2) This is pretty much a guarantee  
(3) No pun intended… but I'll take credit for it anyway

Come and knock on our door  
We promise we won't kill you (no, really!)  
Unless you're with them (the Soldats) or them (the other faction of the Soldats) or them (some other random criminals who hate Noir for no apparent reason)  
'Cause three's Noir-y too!  
(Mireille bass) Or something close enough anyway…

Noir…

It is the name of an ancient fate.

Two maidens who govern death.

See, it says "two." And we even _look_ like the statues.

That doesn't prove anything! It could be a red herring!

Yes, because we've just had tons of those. It's not like there's ever any _foreshadowing_ or _completely obvious revelations_ or anything.

Hey, does anyone else think it's… um… interesting that Mireille's the one who gets the "nursing babes," line?

……

((Sound of flame being slashed in two))

**Chapter One: The Epitome of Anticlimax**  
**(Is that last word there one that should be avoided in a lesbian threesome crackfic?)  
**

"Bitch!"

"Whore!"

"Slut!"

"Assassin who wears BRIGHT RED!"

"Assassin who COMPLETELY stands out in a crowd!"

"Well you're always slipping and falling down for no good reason!"

"You try fighting in heels!"

"And that's another thing! _Why_ do you fight in heels?"

"At least I never took advantage of Kirika's zombie-like mental state to get in random naked kissing!"

"Oh, like you never did anything to her while she was asleep!"

"Th-that's not the point!"

"I think you're both missing the point," interjected a young girl with brown hair and brown eyes. Her name was Yumura Kirika, she was currently dressed rather like a roman goddess (a description neither of the others present would be likely to argue with, in spite of the sheer cultural inappropriateness), and she was clutching a rather bloody shrimp fork in one hand. "Why aren't you dead?"

The question was directed at a similarly-aged girl with neck-length purple hair, wearing a matching outfit, though where hers looked to be made out of silver cloth, while Kirika's was golden. She had, until a moment before, been lying on a slab of stone, rather dead by all accounts, but had apparently tired of it, and had climbed back to her feet just a moment prior to the beginning of our tale. As an assassin, this was something of a sleight to Kirika, who, along with her shrimp fork, was responsible for the sizeable red stain on the other girl's chest.

"You stabbed me in the sternum. With a shrimp fork. Which had prongs that were maybe an inch long. How would that kill me?" the not-dead girl, Chloe, asked. "But it was sweet of you to try! Really!" she added, realizing the implicit insult in both her words and the fact that she wasn't presently decaying on the stone slab. With romantic fondness creeping into her voice, she continued, "You even remembered how you were going to kill me with that shrimp fork on our first date…"

"You are INSANE!" shouted the last member of the trio, a slightly older woman with blonde hair that fell halfway down her back. Her name was Mireille Bouquet, and she was, perhaps, the least effective assassin who has ever intended to be taken seriously. No really. It's in her contract. She cannot kill any named character without extensive assistance and/or saving. "Why do you keep thinking her trying to kill you is a GOOD thing?"

"Autonecrophilia," said Chloe with a shrug. "It's when you're attracted to the idea of yourself being dead, or of a specific love interest killing you."

"…What?"

"You know, like when I begged you to shoot me," Kirika said. "And you wouldn't, so I had to… well… let's not get into that…"

"Wait, you mean that was—!" Mireille stopped short, then stared at the ground, utterly dejected, and sadly pondering what might have been.

The three of them fell silent, each lost in her own thoughts (all of which more or less conformed to the same topic, but I digress). Finally, Kirika broke the silence, trying to wrest her mind from Chloe's fingering of her chest wound, and what it would be like if she had a profusely bleeding injury right near a vital organ like tha—

"So… what do we do now?" she said.

"But bloodstains don't come out of sheets!" Mireille exclaimed. "What? Oh… um… I mean… Uh… you're right, only two of us can be Noir, and… well, of the three of us, there are two who haven't died in the past five minutes, so."

"I didn't _actually_ die!" shouted Chloe. "And you would have been dead anyway if Kirika hadn't—wait, where are you going?!" The other two had turned and were walking away from her. "W—wait! Kirika! Come back…"

"I… I'm sorry, Chloe," said Kirika, without looking back. "But… you don't have an obvious parallel in the various Noir statue representations."

"But… but if you really have to have her—"

"She does," interjected Mireille, sparing the bare minimal attention from her current task—figuring out whether Kirika was wearing underwear beneath that tunic.

"I mean… what's wrong with three people? That's still Noir…y. And then everyone's happy! For a change. That'd be good, right?"

"I don't know…" said Kirika, turning to face Chloe (and so prompting Mireille to do the same). "_All_ of us being happy? I mean… it's bold, but… Can that even happen? Wouldn't it cause some sort of universal fault line to open up and release swarms of horrible tentacled monsters which would then ravage all of existence?"

"And besides, would we even be happy if it was the three of us living together?" Mireille wondered, still too absorbed by Kirika's not-quite skirt to have noticed the use of the words "tentacle monsters," and "ravage," in the previous sentence.

"Well… maybe not…" Chloe admitted, crestfallen.

"See? Let's go, Kirika. Also, think you can do that crazy Russian marching thing? To make sure that your legs are okay for a full range of motion, I mean," Mireille turned once more away from Chloe, and Kirika, casting one last, hesitant glance backwards, followed.

"But… but… but… ONE IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER THAT YOU'LL EVER DO!" Chloe cried after them. "And two can be as bad as one! It's the loneliest number _since_ the number one! So you see, three would be so much better!"

Kirika stopped dead, struck to the core by this compelling argument.

"Huh? Kirika?" said Mireille, noticing her partner's reluctance. "You're not really thinking…"

"But Mireille, she has a point! And I… I can't just abandon her… then she'd just be one more anime character who finally got to kiss their love interest only to drop dead immediately thereafter."

"But she _isn't_—Wait, she KISSED YOU!?" Mireille rounded on Chloe, reaching for her pistol. "You little ska—"

"No, wait! Mireille!" Kirika grabbed Mireille's arm. "We _just_ got done with all that. No more random inexplicable violence!"

There followed what is referred to in certain circles as a "pregnant pause." A time during which every character suddenly sits up and takes note of what had just been said, as though it had connotations that rocked the very foundation of the world to its core.

"Do you realize that—?" began Mireille and Chloe at the same time.

"I _know_!" said Kirika. "But I…" she continued, more softly, "I… I like you both, okay?!"

"….We are so far _beyond_ okay right now…" said Mireille, glancing around as if lightning was about to strike down from the heavens and kill them all. And… as if being especially aware of one's surroundings would make the slightest bit of difference if that were to happen.

"But… I mean… no offense, Mireille, but you kind of kiss like a log, and yes, I _was_ awake." Mireille opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again just as quickly. "And Chloe," Kirika turned towards the purple-haired girl, "you have to understand that Mireille is the mature, pretty, uh… mature… woman who breaks down and cries relatively easily and also needs constant rescuing who I always wanted to be in a relationship with. Also she's been living in the seedy side of society for most of her life, so she must have picked up _something_, and since it certainly wasn't assassination skills… well…"

"So… I can come with you?" Chloe asked, eyes full of impossibly large tears, and also in general reverting some of the way back to "normal," from their typical narrow slits of death. Kirika nodded. Mireille grumbled. Chloe glee'd. Also her eyes went back to being narrow slits, which stared into the depths of your soul as if to gauge how best to pluck it out.

"Well… whatever, let's just go kill Altena," said Mireille, barely bothering to mask her disappointment.

"W-what?! You're going to kill Altena?" Chloe gasped.

"Hey, if you don't like it, you can just stay here," said Mireille. "We'll come back for you. Probably. Or you could try to stop us. Not that I want that. Or anything."

"But… why? You've already given up on being Noir, haven't you?"

"Why? WHY?" Mireille bellowed. "You want to know WHY we're going to kill the woman who's been manipulating us all since we were infants, until we finally got to the point where we've all confessed our feelings and agreed to have a threesome?!"

"Yes."

"Because… um…" Mireille paused. "Kirika, why do we want to kill Altena?"

"I don't know," said Kirika, quizzically. "I was just going with the flow. Like when she gave me my gun back I just sort of felt like I should do something dramatic."

"Actually, now that I think of it, things haven't worked out all _that_ terribly for us. I mean, sure, there was all the abuse and the angst and whatnot, but really… as far as resolving issues go I'm perfectly okay with giving the finger to both factions of the Soldats by just ignoring them and going home."

"Yeah… what did Altena _want_ anyway?" Kirika wondered aloud. "For the Soldats to be… some crazy criminal organization who… help the needy and protect random girls from being raped in wartime?"

"No, Altena just… all she wanted was…" Chloe paused. "Okay, that's weird. Now that I think of it, I spent an inordinate amount of time with her and I still have no idea what she was really trying to accomplish. I kept getting lost in all the rambling about how hatred can save people (and the innuendo). And then she'd laugh, and it was kind of scary, and one time they had to sedate her when she really got going and she fell into sudden… evil…ness for some reason."

"That seems to happen a lot around here…" said Mireille, looking at Kirika.

"It's all this damn Roman/French/Spanish air! It doesn't know what it wants to be! It's like Elfen Lied!" accused Kirika. "There's even random groping! …Now stop it."

"Aww…" sighed Mireille and Chloe.

"So… you're not going to kill Altena?" said Chloe.

"I guess not," said Mireille. "I mean, I can't think of a particularly compelling reason to, seeing as we all seem to have no lasting mental scarring from any of this."

"Hooray!" shouted Chloe, jumping up and down (and giving Mireille a pretty good indication as to the answer of her previous question).

"Well, I guess our work here is done," said Kirika triumphantly. "Let's go home. I'll some make tea!"

"And I'll update our blog so that everyone knows that we're done assassinating people," said Mireille.

"Ooh! Ooh!" shouted Chloe, practically bouncing with crazy teenage girl energy that was entirely at odds with her permanent glare of death. "And then we can have crazy off-screen lesbian—"

And so our three heroines walked off into the sunset, ready to face whatever challenges life threw their way (read: create far more problems for themselves than life was particularly likely to throw their way). God-willing, they will not all be smote down for their deviant behavior before the next "Three's Noir-y, Too!" Cause, you know, it's one thing to kill people for money, but lesbian threesomes? THEN you're in smitin' territory.

Next time, on Three's Noir-y, Too!

Our heroines set out to begin their lives anew! Unfortunately, their apartment isn't quite on the same page. In fact it pretty much needs a contractor and a good redecorating because… _damn_.

Will our heroes be able to tear themselves away from the bed-alcove long enough to restore their abode? (Answer: Yes. Because this isn't _that_ fic.) And what will do the neighbors think of all this? It's EVERY BIT AS EXCITING AS GUN ACTION (really!), on the next Three's Noir-y, Too, Chapter 2: Shoujo Aiyaiyai…

It'll Salva YOUR Nos! Wait a minute…

_Ending Note: Well, not terribly much to say for this fic. I was actually not horrible about excessive culture references. Also the chapter wasn't 10,000 words long. That helped._

Cultural Inappropriateness: _How exactly _does_ a Japanese girl end up with blood from an ancient, secret European order? Japan had closed borders and was hostile to foreigners for… well, the entire Edo era, anyway, and one assumes much of the rest of the time. Certainly I don't think there were many Europeans running around creating needlessly complicated lineages._

Autonecrophilia: _Wouldn't it just figure that when I so much as touch erotic description it would be about festering wounds and the like? Also, I really hope I invented this term. Otherwise I would lose all faith in humanity (but it's okay for me to do it). Oh, and expect the "shoot me!" scene to be interpreted this way if I ever get _remotely_ that far in making Noir fan parodies (it's what the idea was for to begin with)._ _Really, it's all tone of voice, you don't even need to change the dialogue… "Shoot me! Please! Mireille!"_

One is the loneliest number: _It really is, you know. Obviously a reference to the song "One" by Three Dog Night. Up to you whether Chloe is singing this or just shouting it, though personally I love the way song lyrics sound if they're just randomly shouted instead of sung._

"It's like Elfen Lied!": _Weeeiiird manga (just finished it earlier today, as it happens). It alternates between genuine horror with a decent plot and some interesting ideas floating around to… random… groping and other ecchi-ness. Also half of the cast hates the other half of the cast, and a differently divided half of the cast loves its opposite half of the cast (and these are not mutually exclusive in all cases). Again, weird._

_Anyway, that's about it. My intent is to finish How the God Generals Replicated Christmas by _this _Christmas seeing as I blew it last year, so I wouldn't count on this particular work updating in the immediate future, but I shall certainly try to find some time for it eventually.  
_


	2. Sans Housse

_Author Note: Well, not a whole lot to say because I'm updating in a semi-timely fashion this time (Yay! Now if only it were for the fic that I had a self-imposed deadline for…). First off, thank you to everyone who reviewed the first chapter, I got 3 or 4, which is…rather surprisingly good for a seemingly dead fandom. Admittedly that means that anyone who still cares hasn't had anything much to read in forever, but still… pleasant surprise when I started getting actual comments._

_Anyway, reason for the speedy update. As you may or may not be aware, I'm Jewish, and Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) is coming up, so I just figured I'd better get all my sinning in before I have to repent and promise to be a better person in the coming year. So there you go. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to go make a fan parody (in the immortal words of Mr. Big Fro: "Now_ That's _Evil!" Go see S.T.E.A.M. the Movie if you're ever at an anime con which shows fan parodies). For the record, that is coming along nicely, though my (I think?) Kirika has no microphone and I fail as a director because I can't tell my Mireille (again, I think?) how I want her to do the voice. But other than that… yeah, okay, this could still be a while. In the meantime, please enjoy:_

**Three's Noir-y, Too!**  
**A Crackfic Written in Blacker than Black Pixels (using a Blacker than Black keyboard)  
By Duo Himura**

The Noir…ish Friends:  
Averaged out to be three of earth's most skilled assassins.  
Joining forces ((winkwink)) under one roof…  
To face the challenge of everyday life!  
Starring…

Major Failure!  
AmaterI'll(bleep)ingkillyou!  
And the Unambiguous Chloe!  
In…  
The Noir-ish Friends!

Noir…

It is the name of an ancient fate.

Two maidens who govern over death.

Should we really still be doing this if there are three of us now?

And we're not even Noir anymore.

Well _I'm _Noir.

_You_ were the one who got us to _stop_ being Noir!

But… but… Atashi wa shin no Nowaru!

Uh… Kirika?

…I have no idea.

…

What? You think because I'm from Japan that I speak Japanese? I was just reading the subtitles!

……

((Sound of a flame being slashed in two))

Seriously?

No. But it would be slightly less improbable than a bunch of Italians and Germans and French people all speaking Japanese to each other.

Point.

Are we… actually allowed to keep talking after that flame thing goes out?

Huh… never thought about it. I guess s—

**Chapter 2: And That's When All Our Troubles Began**

"Ah… w-wait… Mireille…" said Kirika, as something shifted in the general tangle of arms, legs and sheets. "Don't do tha—ah—a—" Shivers shot up and down her spine, fleeing out to her extremities. "C-Chloe?" she stammered, as the other girl moved to join Mireille. "Ah… no, st—" was all she could get out before her breath failed her entirely and she was struck mute, totally lost in physical sensation. She remained thus for a moment, before finally managing to utter the words, "Y-you guys can't _both_ get up _and _take the covers!"

The room was, after all, quite cold. Kirika, disturbed from the relative comfort of what had been a sort of pretzel shape, sat upright, hugging herself against the chill and shivering intensely. "Where are you going, anyway?"

"Bathroom," came the harmonious mutter.

"Well, don't take the blankets _there_!" she said, but the other two weren't listening. They had turned to glare at each other, with a sudden, burning look in their eyes (mostly Chloe's). The air seemed to crackle with electricity as they stared each other down and sized each other back up again. And, all at once, they turned and bolted.

It seemed at first that Chloe's experience performing crazy acrobatics with a large, awkward piece of cloth to contend with would give her the advantage, but, as she quickly discovered, the rules were somewhat different here. The agile assassin, forgetting that she was as much wrapped in as covered by the blanket, sprang up and onto the partition between the bed-area and the rest of the room—and it went well enough, until she couldn't get her feet apart to balance on the landing. She slid right off of the low wall, toppling over, and landed on the other side with an audible crash and much high-pitched, vaguely innocent-sounding cursing.

This opened up the way for Mireille, who wasted no time in pressing her advantage, though she took a more straightforward, ground-based approach. Half-hobbling, half-running, she tore out of the alcove, and dashed off into the darkness beyond.

_Thud._ "OW!"

And all the while, Kirika still sat on the bed, trembling at the cold, and blinking at the failure. She should probably go make sure that the others hadn't seriously injured themselves. But that would mean getting up. But they had the blankets. But that would require _moving_. But it was fucking COLD.

She found Chloe collapsed on the opposite side of the partition, half-wrapped around some object which Kirika suspected was an overturned chair, muttering, "Oh… Kirika…" and stroking it gently with one arm that had been freed from the tangle. In other words, she was sleeping normally, if memory served. Kirika moved on.

"Are you okay?" she asked, when she approached a mass which she suspected to be Mireille.

"Ungh…" came the mass' vague reply. Either she was right, or there was a five-foot-long talking badger in the middle of their room. She was pretty comfortable with both possibilities.

"Good. I'm taking this." And with that she tugged sharply on the blanket, dumping Mireille Bouquet unceremoniously on the floor.

"Ow… H-hey! It's col—"

"I _know_!"

Grumbling, the blonde stood, took another step towards her ultimate, porcelain-coated destination… and immediately slipped once again on whatever had caused her to fall the first time.

"Maybe we ought to clean this place up…" Kirika said, staring down at her recently-reacquainted-with-gravity partner (they went way back, those two). "And get the lights fixed."

"Ugh…" said Mireille.

"No… we can't… what if Altena…?" murmured Chloe from across the room.

Kirika just sighed, and made her way, rather more cautiously, back to bed.

This had pretty much been the norm since their return the apartment, some three days prior. The bed had been abandoned only for food, water, bathroom breaks, and the odd changing of the sheets (they also watched the occasional episode of Gilmore Girls, but they could do that from the bed). Showers, they had all agreed, were almost as important. However, that had not stopped them from being largely neglected since the unfortunate incident where they learned that the three of them did _not_ fit into their one-person shower. This was mostly due to the fact that, for Kirika to take a shower, it was necessary to remove a whole assortment of guns, knives, cutlery, sunglasses, student ID cards, and sports drinks from the room as well. Those didn't fit very well in their one-person shower either. And the other two simply didn't trust each other alone with Kirika (albeit with good reason).

Which brought up another point. It had become increasingly obvious over the past days that, in spite of everything that had been said, this was not so much a threesome as both sides of a love triangle acting simultaneously. In fact, Mireille and Chloe seemed not only to have no amorous feelings towards each other, which would have made things awkward enough, but also to be trying to avoid physical contact altogether. This was essentially impossible, as the three of them slept on a bed which was designed to accommodate two people at _best_. Still, those tendencies were enough to make an already complicated sleeping arrangement borderline Byzantine.

However, if Chloe and Mireille were lacking in affection towards each other, they made up for it when it came to Kirika. That was okay—well, okay didn't begin to cover it—by her… some of the time. And yet, the sheer degree to which both of them focused on her made her feel somewhat… overwhelmed. It got to the point where she didn't feel like she had enough attention… limbs… etc. to go around. It was, after all, a bit of a jump to go from being completely alone, to having a mostly silent, restrained relationship (with the occasional excepted moment when Mireille thought she was a asleep) with just one person, to having a… less restrained relationship with just one person (although she was still a little CRAZY on the details of that period), to suddenly having two other people all but obsess over her.

Scratch that. To suddenly having two people obsess over her. She was forgetting the death threats, triggered whenever she raised her voice about the tiniest thing (even for a comment like "…Lower," which had… pretty much killed the mood). The arguments/accusations about who was worthy of her. The… general snippiness about everything from shooting skills to… well, actually, manual dexterity had really accounted for most of it.

Putting it all like that, it was a wonder that anything at all had happened the past three days (It did. Oh, and how! How indeed? Good question.).

Morning brought with it a new perspective, new light, and a new, tangled, everyone-is-on-top-of-and-underneath-everyone-else-at-the-same-time position (apparently Mireille and Chloe had, at the least, found their way back to the bed eventually). After some carefully-planned wriggling, the three of them managed to separate themselves, and got ready for the day.

By about noon things had reached enough of a lull for the three of them to recall the previous night's incident, get up, and begin to take inventory of their neglected, battle-scarred abode. For Kirika's part, she had been so wrapped up in trying to respond to Chloe and Mireille—in both a romantic sense and in a making sure they didn't kill each other-sense—that there had been precious little of her attention to be spared on the state of the apartment. But now she saw it. Bullet holes through the walls, the pool table pockmarked by their passage; and on the floor shattered glass, and all manner of discarded objects that they hadn't known where to throw out since the Soldats had stolen their only trash bin. And…

"GATSBY!" Kirika cried in dismay, spotting the familiar brown pot. "What happened to you!?" The pot may have been familiar, but the plant it contained was hardly recognizable—wilted and browning, no longer standing tall but leaning to one side like a soldier with a leg wound. "Mireille! What did you do to poor Mr. Gatsby?!"

"…Gatsby?"

"Mireille!"

"I forgot to water it, okay? I thought I was going to kill you, so it didn't really seem that important. And then there was symbolism and everything," she gave a slight shrug. "But… GATSBY?"

"I was trying to impress you!" said Kirika, unconsciously causing Chloe to go into a pout behind her. "It's the only literary reference I know! For… some reason…"

"What does it have to do with anything, though?" the blonde enquired.

"Well… The Great Gatsby has a 'time' theme, too! It's sort-of related. You know, 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the past,' and all that."

"But that's the _opposite_ of our theme! We're all about getting over the past and moving on! And anyway, The Great Gatsby is about the collapse of the American Dream."

"Oh…" said Kirika.

"I still think it's a cool name," chimed Chloe in the silence that followed.

Mireille stared back and forth between her partner and her partner-by-extension, with the blank look of one trying not to pass judgment because just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had. And, at that moment, she reached a decision—that, whatever their lives were to be from that moment on, whatever the future might hold for them, those two were _getting_ some lessons in literary analysis!

So, after a brief (but comparatively well-attended) funeral for Mr. Gatsby, began the lengthy and involved process of cleaning the apartment. Trash was gathered into a pile in the continuing absence of a trashcan, and was shoved into a corner of the room; floors were swept, knick-knacks were dusted, and all with needlessly flashy and acrobatic ACTION.

Time wore on, the light faded, and, bit by bit, the apartment began to resemble its former, tidy self. Except for the bullet holes. In retrospect, given the temperature of the room at night, fixing those probably should have been a priority. Or the lights.

"Uh… it's getting dark…" Chloe said.

"No, really?" said Mireille, the twilight leaving her normally lustrous hair more of a dull yellow.

"Do we really not have _any_ working lights?"

"No, not since your pals came in and _deliberately _smashed all of our light bulbs while we were distracted!"

"You know, for a highly trained group of assassins, they've got sort of a… middle school vandalism thing going on…" added Kirika.

"Well, why don't we just get some light bulbs, then?" said Chloe crossly.

"Great! See you when you get back!" Mireille snapped back.

"Okay, fine."

"Wait, really?"

"Yeah. It's just getting light bulbs."

"Aren't you worried that I'm going to have my way with Kirika while you're gone?" asked Mireille with a frankness that caused Kirika to stare awkwardly at her for a moment. This, of course, went completely unnoticed by either of the others.

"Psht. Who the hell do you think I am?" demanded Chloe, with a devil-may-care grin on her face. "Nobody in the world is better than me at fetch quests. I walked all the way from the French/Spanish border to Paris and back _every_ time I came to see you. So you won't even have time to try anything. You may wear red, but you're pretty far from being three times faster."

"H-hey!" said Mireille, turning a shade of pink which she would have known matched Kirika rather well if she were paying the slightest bit of attention.

And with that, Chloe turned her back and strode confidently out the door. The instant she was out of the room, Mireille, having recovered from her embarrassment by deciding that modesty wasn't really worth it at this point, shot a sly glance towards Kirika. For her part, Kirika had already gotten a jump start on panicking about the inevitable fight that was going to result from all this when Chloe got back (she _did_ have a point). However, that particular train of thought was promptly shunted to one side by Mireille's hips, swung back and forth in a greatly exaggerated fashion as she drew closer and—

_SLAM! _Startled, the two assassins whirled towards the source of the noise. In the entrance to the room they found Chloe, her back up against the door as if bracing it against a forced entry, her chest heaving with great, panting breaths.

"C-Chloe? What happened?" Kirika said.

"Man… on stairs… heart attack… I think." she gasped, "Why… no one tell me… not wearing clothes…?"

"Oh yeah," said Mireille, with the tone of one who has finally remembered what exactly was amiss with their situation.

"I guess we just kind of got used to it. Sorry," said Kirika.

"Well, I can't show my face out there for a while. Any other ideas?" Chloe asked.

"Oh, fine, I'll do it," said Kirika. "You two probably wouldn't be able to find your clothes/weapons before I get back anyway."

"Hey! I know right where—" Mireille paused for a moment in mid sentence, took a quick evaluative glance around the room, and promptly began dashing from corner to corner, staring intently at the obviously vacant space. Finally she ran back into the sleeping area, followed shortly by the sounds of opening drawers and the cry, "Damn it, why did we _clean_?!"

Chloe, meanwhile, was occupied similarly, checking under the floorboards. Evidently forgetting that they were not on the ground floor.

"Hey!"

"Whoa… that's pretty sick… and I'm an assassin _and _in a lesbian threesome. Did you cut that _yourself_?"

"Don't tell my wife!" pleaded a voice from below. "If she knew that I bought this 5000 1:100 scale Space Battleship Yamato model, I… well…" he let the threat dangle. "Also, why are you naked?"

"Can't find my clothes. Seen them?"

"Uh… no."

Allowing herself a slight grin at her own prudence, Kirika strode over to the wardrobe where she kept her clothes, neat and organized (which she had taken the time to do when the others were occupied over… something, probably trying to kill each other). She opened the door, peered inside, and…

It was empty. Well, guess she'd have to pick up some new—Wait… empty!? That wasn't right! Where were her school uniforms, which she had stopped wearing because you can only cheat airflow mechanics so many times while doing acrobatics? Where were her dorky hoodies and shorts, which were excellent for concealing lethal weapons (in the neighborhood of 12 for her, though for most people it would be just the one)? Where was the pair of pants she occasionally wore just to make things difficult for anyone who wanted to assert that Mireille wore the pants in their relationship?

She felt around the empty wardrobe in dismay, unable to believe her eyes, searching desperately for any remaining article of clothing, or else the gate to Narnia, whichever came first. And then she saw it. It hung there, lonely, on the edge of the clothing rack, staring back at her in exactly the way that clothes usually don't. Gold thread woven together into a lightweight but substantive tunic (which stopped at about pelvic height). Ridiculously awkward silver medallions at the neck and waist. A neckline that ran down to the bottom of her ribcage (admittedly, this was not the problem for her that it would have been for, say, Mireille, but—she caught herself there. If she let her thoughts shift onto the topic of swapping clothes with Mireille, it would be a while before she could get back to anything important).

Forcing herself to return to the issue at hand, and not ponder whether Altena had made that outfit from the other Noir statue with no chest component at all, Kirika began to address the situation analytically. She was certain that she had placed all of her clothes in the wardrobe. Therefore, something must have happened to them. But who… who would want to remove all of her clothes… and… leave only…

"Guys? What happened to all of my other clothes?" Kirika said, turning back towards the other two and holding up her last remaining garment.

"Well, hey, you're one-up on us," said Mireille, poking her head back into the main room. Chloe, still off to one side, ended her conversation with the tenant downstairs via dropping the plank back into place, and nodded.

"But I mean… the rest of my clothes were definitely in here."

"Are you sure?" asked Mireille.

"Yeah," said Chloe, "maybe you moved them and just forgot?"

"Or maybe they got misplaced during all the cleaning," offered Mireille.

"That does happen."

"All the time."

"They're probably just lost somewhere."

"Or they might be gone."

"Gone forever."

"Never to be seen again."

"They may have been burned."

"It was _her_ idea!" they both shouted at once, jabbing accusing fingers at each other.

"You threw out all of my clothes?" said Kirika at last.

"…Yes."

Kirika said nothing, simply slid open one of the drawers on the wardrobe, and peered inside. Sighing, she closed it again. "Did you _have_ to get rid of my _underwear_ too?"

"…Yes."

"Well, I can't go out like this," she said, throwing her hands up in defeat.

"You can borrow—" two voices began at once.

"You don't even know where you clothes _are_!"

There was a moment of silence, as the three of them pondered their second failure. And then, all eyes in the room fell on Mireille.

"H-hey, I don't—" said Mireille, feeling the weight of both Kirika and Chloe's stares.

"Well, you are the one of us who's the closest to going around in public naked," said Chloe.

"Wh—I am not! What about that open-air bath thing?"

"There wasn't anyone around for—"

"Oh yes there was!" cried Mireille. "Uh… I mean…"

"Fine, fine, I'll go," said Kirika, already dressed in her Noir-outfit.

"W-what? No! Without underwear, you'd be…" said Mirielle.

"Besides… that's kind of getting dangerously close to something out of Chobits, isn't it?" asked Chloe.

"Be that as it may, apparently it's the only way this is getting done. And it's not like I can't kill anyone who tries anything with his own hair."

"True," both admitted.

And at that very moment, there came a knock at the door.

"I'll get it!" said Chloe, who was closest.

"Wait, Chloe, you're still—"

"Hello!" called a voice from the other side of the door, "I—"

Silence.

"Y…you… you're naked…" said the voice. "And… Oh dear…" he had apparently gotten a glimpse into the rest of the room, through the door which had begun to drift open. "Guys, you'd better get up here. We've got our work cut out for us..."

There were footsteps from outside the door, and then more voices began to speak, "Huh? Oh. W…wait, they didn't mention that there were _three_ of them!"

"And who designed that outfit? Aurelia _Maximus_?"

"At least she's dressed."

"Hey! It's not like we were expecting company," said Mireille, defensively.

"I can see that!" added the fifth and final member of the group.

"Who the hell are you people anyway?!" demanded Chloe.

"…You don't know who we are?" asked one of the five, a man with rectangular classes and slightly receding brown hair.

"You'll have to forgive her," said Mireille. "She was raised in an ancient ruin, forgotten by time, by the pseudo-cultist leader of a secret criminal organization that runs the world from the shadows. They only got local access."

"Well, I guess an introduction is in order. Hit it!"

_You came into my life…_

As the three assassins glanced around in confusion, trying to identify the source of the music which had suddenly begun to play, smoke billowed into the room from the hallway, providing a background against which the newcomers proceeded to strike dynamic poses.

"To protect the world form second-rate food and wine!"

"To make sure that everyone's hair is just fine!"

"To redecorate rooms with truth and love!"

"And deliver fashions from the heavens above!"

"Ted Allen!"

"Kyan Douglas!"

"Thom Filicia!"

"Carson Kressley!"

"The Fab Five deliver fabulousness at the speed of light!" they all shouted in unison. "Surrender your flawed notions of what is 'in' and 'hip' or prepare to fight!"

"Jai Rodriguez! Insert pop culture reference here!"

"…What?"

_All things just… All things just… All things just keep getting better. _

Next Episode:

It's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy vs. The Noir Girls! Who is the greatest awkwardly numbered group of homosexuals?(1) Find out on the next Three's Noir-y, Too!

(1) This is a… fairly reprehensible thing to say. Let me try again.

What awaits our heroines now that the cast of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has arrived at their home? Strenuous programs of exercise and healthy diet? Revenge? Being forced to actually wear clothes for a change? Well… probably that last one. Can our heroines endure their enforced makeover, and continue to believe in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us? Again, probably. I've sort of got a sex humor thing going on here, so yeah, kind of hard to do otherwise.

But will they ever get their light bulbs? EVEN I can pretend I don't know. Oh the suspense! Oh the drama! Oh the next episode of Three's Noir-y, Too! Chapter 3: In the Name of the Moon, We Shall Redecorate! Fight on through the darkness, Noir + 1!

_Ending Note: Well, not much to say here, so on to the references (a couple more this time around)._

The Noir…ish Friends: _Based on the opening to The Justice Friends segment of the vintage (?) Cartoon-Cartoon Dexter's Lab. The original characters were "Major Glory," "Val Hallen," and "The Infraggable Krunk," so I played with them as best I could. I had no idea what to do with Kirika, so I settled for "mix mythology with whatever their unique talent is," (Val Hallen was a mix of "Valhalla" and Eddie Van Hallen) so she became… The Sun-Goddess of Killing People with Various Household Items. Or something._

And That's When All Our Troubles Began: _The title is… sort of a reference to the segment of the They Might Be Giants song "Fingertips" which includes a similar line? I dunno, I was _thinking _of it, but it's kind of a generic thing to say, so…_

"GATSBY!": _Some slight self-deprecating humor here, as __The Great Gatsby__ is about the only "classic which you must read," that I've read. I've read other _classics,_ but it's the only one that gets talked about a lot (for instance, I've read Mary Shelley's __Frankenstein__ but everyone who talks about __Frankenstein__ talks about the movie, which is extremely different)._ _Anyway. Thought it'd be fun if Kirika tried to make a literary reference, since they're pretty much Mireille's territory in the series canon (and of course, she gets the symbolism mixed up, because she has AMNESIA. Or something). The "comparatively well-attended" remark is… well, there were a couple people at Gatsby's funeral in the novel, but I think three was equal to or one better than the novel._

Just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had: _One of the early lines of __The Great Gatsby__, the advice which Nick's father gave him about why you shouldn't pass judgment on people, which he has been turning over in his mind ever since (ostensibly)._

"Who the hell do you think I am?": _Obligatory Gurren Lagann reference. And yes, I probably am going to do one of those in everything I write for quite some time. Go watch Gurren Lagann and you, too, can enjoy it._

"You may wear red, but you're pretty far from being three times faster.": _A reference to Mobile Suit Gundam, specifically to the character Char Aznable. He was nicknamed "The Red Comet," because he painted his personal mechs red, and he was a superb pilot who tended to move very fast. Thus, there was a rumor that his custom (red) Zaku was actually 3 times faster than a normal Zaku, which caught on as a meme among Gundam fans (and Bandai has used it for marketing as well, apparently)—thus, Bandai's line of "Char Custom" pencils are three times more likely to break (or write three times faster), anonymous posters on the 2chan Gundam boards are "Three times more anonymous," etc._

"Damn it, why did we _clean_?!": _Not a reference, but oh so true. More things are lost by cleaning than by living with the mess1._

_1 This statistic is not supported by anything and is probably just the author making stuff up. Please ignore._

"1:100 scale Space Battleship Yamato": _Well, there's nothing particularly funny about this, except that that model would be in the neighborhood of 8 feet long. I think. I don't know if the Yamato was made bigger in Space Battleship Yamato in addition to being converted into… a spaceship (yes that is horribly impractical, but it's Matsumoto Leiji, so the pure romanticism makes up for it… hell, the auto-thesaurus lists "impracticality" as a synonym for romanticism). _

"Something out of Chobits": _Specifically, I believe this is the premise of the animated short "Chibits," about…basically Chii going out without underwear, and the two "laptop" persocoms trying to chase her down before something embarrassing happens._

"The Fab Five": _From Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, in case you've spent the past five years… not paying attention to shows where gay men teach straight men how to clean up their lives/wardrobes. Or South Park (Or the episode preview). They're parodying the Team Rocket motto, if you didn't gather that._

The green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us: _Another Gatsby reference, this time a line from near the end of the book. I just… the "orgastic future," you know? I had to use it somehow._

Noir + 1:_ Vague reference to the anime Flag (which is pretty interesting, really, and I have a feeling very under appreciated), which has an episode entitled SDAC + 1 (SDAC being the name of the elite squad that most of the main cast is part of). _

_Anyway, that's all from me. Thanks for reading, and next year in Jerusalem! …This _still_ isn't the right holiday for that phrase, and I still have no intention of going to Jerusalem by this time next year. Next year in…college. I guess. Yeah… L'shanah Tovah, all you people crazy enough to actually read this._


	3. Now with Clothes!

_Author's Note: I liiiiiiive! Like Frankenstein's Monster, yo. That's right, we're going OLD SKOOL, getting' all up in yo countenance (it's funny if you've read Frankenstein, just trust me on this)!_

_Ahem. Well, I'll try to keep this brief, since the wait has certainly been long enough already. It's not_ really_ an abnormally long break from uploading anything for me, but suffice it to say applying to college sucks. I'm in where I most wanted to get in, which is a relief, but now come the scholarship applications… Also I've been trying to work on more serious stuff. But really, I've just been uninspired. Which is why this chapter ends where it does. If I had wanted to end it there I could have done so at least a month ago—but I wanted to have this story arc be all one chapter. But I have no idea how long that would take, it was at an okay breaking point, and frankly, I've been staring at the same point of this story trying to think what to write next for far too long. I need for my own sake to have the sense of starting something fresh, or I'll just keep opening the file, looking at it for a few minutes, and then giving up. And as a writer, I have to stop doing things like that if I ever want to improve (and besides which, it leaves all of you guys in the lurch as well)._

_On that note, thank you for the support you've given this story. It's more than I was expecting from a fairly inactive fandom. I suppose that gives me the benefit of being one of very few people actually writing new stuff, but even so, my experience with inactive fandoms would suggest that I'm doing pretty well here. I'll try to take that as a responsibility to pull my act together and not let this thing sit untouched for another six months. After all, no lesbian threesome crackfic should ever have to go that long without bein—yeah okay, that's uh… yeah._

_All seriousness aside, let's get on with the show!_

**Three's Noir-y, Too!****  
It is the Name of a… Seven-Month-Old Crackfic  
By Duo Himura**

OP: A Houseful of Assassins (To the tune of the Full House Theme)

Whatever happened to predictability?  
The foreshadowing, the flashbacks, girls with guns (and tea).  
They never missed a single grunt, but  
They didn't bleed anyway…

Everywhere you look (everywhere you look)  
There's some guy (there's some guy) who's probably trying to kill you.  
Everywhere you look (everywhere you look)  
There's some girl with a blatant crush on you.  
When you're lost out there, and you're all alone  
Some blatant symbolism, will mess up the rhyme scheme…  
Everywhere you look.

Whatever happened to predictability?  
Love triangles resolved by killing one of the three.  
How did they get to living here? Well, it's a little thing called crack.  
This whole world's pretty messed up.

Story as dark as you've ever seen,  
And an author who throws it out.  
And a little voice inside you whispering,  
"This'll be crazy, without a doubt…"

Everywhere you look (everywhere you look)  
There's a plot device coming from nowhere.  
Everywhere you look (everywhere you look)  
There's a pop culture reference, that nobody else will get.  
So when you're alone out there, where you don't know  
Just look 'round for something from The Rocky Horror Picture Show!  
Everywhere you look.

Noir…

It is the name of an ancient fate… which we've pretty much been ignoring.

And then the Queer Eye guys showed up.

Maybe it's karma.

"Bad things happen to people who stop doing the bad things they've _been_ doing?"

Well… karma by _our_ incredibly twisted standards.

I think it's just The Great Law of the Plot in action.

What's The Great Law of the Plot?

"Content people are boring."

Wouldn't that mean we can never… win?

Well, yes. But we can probably still have sex in between various periods of things going horribly awry.

Eh, good enough.

((Sound of flame being slashed in two))

Wait, why didn't I get any lines this time?

**Chapter 3: The Long, Dark Division of Love**

"Nnnngg…" Mireille Bouquet grimaced at the touch. She hadn't expected it to be _this_ painful… and she had been stabbed in the leg recently. In fact, her not-very-healed leg wound wasn't helping matters.

"S-sorry…" came Kirika's voice from behind her.

"No, don't _stop_," Mireille commanded, feeling the younger girl withdraw.

"Um… a-are you sure…?"

"Yes, I'm sure, now just—aaagh!" Caught off-guard this time, the blonde assassin couldn't prevent herself from crying out. Still, if there was one thing Mireille was good at, it was regaining her composure in short order after completely losing it. She hastily bit down on the noise, shutting it off, and even managed to utter a quick sentence without her voice cracking: "Don't you dare stop again." Kirika complied dutifully.

Mireille flinched as the small, delicate hands went about their task. And all at once, a question occurred to her, one which, for the life of her, she couldn't think why she hadn't asked. "Um… Kirika… have you done this before?"

Silence.

"Oh. Right. Sorry."

Whether the sudden increase in pain she felt shortly thereafter was simply part of the process, or was the amnesiac girl's response to the rather insensitive question, Mireille couldn't say. This was because she found herself clenching her teeth for all her jaw was worth (approximately $150. On a related note, she needed to stop randomly browsing Craig's List). At this point she was pretty much willing to swear that being stabbed in the leg had been less painful, but she knew if she could just endure this for a minute more—

_Crack_.

"Ahhhhhh…" Mireille let out a sigh of relief and exhaustion, as behind her, Kirika eased her leg back onto the bed.

"Better?" she asked.

Mireille experimentally flexed the leg in question a few times. "Much. Thanks," she said, rolling over and grinning at Kirika, who stood at the side of the bed. "But seriously, where did you learn chiropractics?"

Kirika frowned.

"I'm kidding! Kidding!" Mireille said hastily, wishing she meant it and hadn't just forgotten again.

"Okay, you're better, now it's my turn! Hurry up!" Chloe said, her voice somewhere between anger and pouting.

"Right, sorry…" Kirika said, walking around to the opposite side of the bed, where Chloe lay, trying to put as much space as possible between herself and Mireille as she could without actually falling off. "How did you _both_ manage to injure yourselves like this anyway?"

"It's a long story…" said Mireille, getting up from the bed to make sure everything was in proper order with her leg (also to avoid having to share it with _just_ Chloe). "Which you were there for. So you're asking… why?"

"It was a rhetorical question," said Kirika, as she began bending Chloe's left leg back, pushing it carefully beyond its normal range of motion. "Plus I thought it'd be a good lead-in for a flashback."

"It wasn't a very _good_ rhetorical question," Mireille muttered. "And what we're doing right now is called…?"

"…Chiropractics?" Kirika offered.

"Sexual innuendo?" suggested Chloe, through clenched teeth.

"No! That was earlier!" snapped Mireille. "It's 'in medias res!' When you start in the middle of the story and then flash back to the beginning!"

"But aren't we at the end?"

"There could be more!" shouted Mireille. "Do we know for sure?"

"Well…" said Kirika.

_Well… well… well… well…_ And all at once everything went all ripple-y.

"See, I told you. Flashback."

The previous day…

As awkward silences went, the one which presently permeated the apartment was neither the most awkward nor the most silent. However, while it might be lacking in those areas, the silence more than made up for it with sheer heart. Where other silences might give up when a person coughed, or commented on what an awkward silence this was, this one refused to surrender to the very end. It never said "die," or… anything else, for that matter, being, you know, silent. It went on and on, as if it were the Rocky franchise of silences, and thus, though it may fade, this silence would live on forever in the hearts and minds of all who bore it witness.

"Well…" said Ted Allen, shattering the silence. "This is awkward."

"I've seen worse," Mireille said with a shrug, her roommates nodding their agreement. After all, as assassins they were well trained in all forms of silence, even "In space no one can hear you scream," although that one tended to be rather fatal, so now they just simulated it. Why a couple of the fab five nodded as well she didn't know, and wasn't sure she wanted to.

"I don't understand," said Carson Kressley. "Why are you two _naked_?"

"_Guess_," said Mireille.

"But didn't anyone tell you that we were coming?" Kressley asked.

"No… why _are_ you here?"

"Yeah, when I tried to figure out what was going on earlier I just got a dramatic introductory speech," said Chloe.

"Isn't it obvious?" Kyan Douglas asked what is possibly the most useless question on the planet. "You've been selected to be subject of the next Queer Eye for the Straight Guy!"

"But we didn't sign up for anything!" Mireille said. "And we're not guys. Or straight."

"Kirika, nobody's answering my questions, and I'm bored…" said Chloe in her best five-year-old voice (about 3 years younger than her default tone), pulling on the hem of the other girl's tunic, which, you will recall, was dangerously high. "Can we go back to screwing like bunnies?"

"I'm not sure that's appropriate," said Kirika. "I think it only works if you actually produce children as a result. But sure."

"Wha—Are they really going to—?" Ted Allen said, staring after the two girls, who had headed off in the direction of the bed-alcove.

"Kirika! Chloe!" Mireille shouted. "Not while we have company!"

"Oh, thank God," said Allen. She may be naked—and really, as times when he was glad he was gay went, this one was fairly high on the list—but at least this one seemed to be pretty rational.

_Slam!_

Ted Allen stood, staring at the closed door to the apartment. And blinking. He did quite a bit of blinking.

That was a joke… right? This kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen to him! He was on TV! He was solely responsible for teaching America that homosexual people were just like everyone else only better at fashion! He was Ted-fucking-Allen!

He was pondering how to reword that last sentence when the door opened again. Well, opened in a loose sense of the word—the space between the door and the frame was little more than a crack, through which could be seen the blonde woman he'd been speaking with before.

"Oh, you're still here?" she said.

"Of course we're still here! We have a show to do! Now, are you going to cooperate or—"

"Whatever the second option is," she said, nodding. "But if you're going to hang around anyway, could you go into town and pick us up some light bulbs? We've been out for days. Oh, and some clothes, I guess. Thanks." And with that, she disappeared inside the room again, closing the door. But not before poking one hand into the hallway to hang a small, off-white "Do Not Disturb" sign from the doorknob.

Thus was Ted Allen left alone in the hallway, to resume his staring and blinking at the door, and for all that the "Do Not Disturb" sign added a splash of color variation, it did not heal the aching sense of "What the hell just happened here?" in his heart. However, there comes a time when even Ted Allen cannot stare and blink any longer, when he has to take matters into his own hands. He knew what had to be done. He took the doorknocker into his own hands, and slammed it down several times, quite loudly.

"The sign says—" called a voice from within.

"I can _read_!" shouted Ted Allen.

"Really? That's weird when you consider that you're a star in an American reality show reading the sign in a French apartment occupied by a Corsican, a Japanese girl, and… whatever the hell Chloe is."

"I'm special!"

"Sure, we'll go with that."

"I'm not going to go _shopping_ for you! We're not your lackeys!"

"…Isn't you shopping for us basically the premise of your show?"

He had to think about that one. "Well… yeah but… you're not supposed to like it! Or at least… you're not supposed to _pick_…"

"Look, Ted—can I call you Ted?" came the voice of the blonde woman again. "Ted-chan. Yes, I think we'll go with that. Ted-chan, we're about to go to bed here, if you catch my drift. Please take your camera crews and kindly GTFO."

"GTFO?" came another voice; he thought it was the purple-haired girl.

"We'll tell you when you're older, Chloe."

"I know what it means! Why did you _say_ something in chatspeak?"

"IDK, my BFF Jill?"

"…Mireille, please stop watching those cell phone commercials. I'm starting to worry," said the third girl, the one who had actually been clothed, though he was beginning to doubt that that description applied anymore.

"Look, we've got a show to do here, and if we have to film you guys going at it we totally will," chimed in one of the camera crew, causing the fab five to turn as one and glare at him. Really, you just couldn't get good straight-help these days.

"We really would appreciate if you—" began Ted.

It was at approximately this moment when the entire group in the hallway had a sudden revelation. The reality of what they'd been doing wrong came out of the woodwork, leaping into the air and very nearly smacking them in the face with its clarity. They shouldn't _force_ themselves on these girls—the show would quite simply never work if the people involved weren't compliant. Rather, they should agree to do the show on the terms of the trio, and so not have to explain to their various bosses why they were returning empty handed after _flying to_ _Paris_ to shoot.

Thus the Fab Five and co. decided to call it a day, and return tomorrow with a fresh perspective, fresh patience, possibly some fresh orange juice, and a fresh camera without a bullet in it. In the meantime, they had some light bulbs and clothing to pick up.

In life, the times when a person honestly has no idea what to expect are relatively few and far between. For the most part, logic is the same for everyone, and while things like emotions, quantum physics, and whatever one would term the black murmurings which spill forth from the mouths of politicians, seemingly without end, don't necessarily have anything to do with logic, the basic elements of cause and effect can be seen in almost everything. No, although human beings face uncertainty about the future every day, usually there are several possibilities that are held above the others. It is thus most rare to find oneself in a situation where one truly believes that anything _could_ happen, and just may if you're not careful.

When he knocked on the door of the three girls' apartment the next day, Ted Allen found himself in such a situation.

Ted Allen and his compadres had arrived in Paris intending to do another run-of-the-mill shoot for Queer Eye. Although the City of Lights was certainly a wonderful backdrop, and a nice change of pace from New York besides, there had been nothing to indicate that this show would be different from any other. Since that arrival, he had learned that the subjects of the show were a) plural, b) female, and c) lesbians. They were also d) armed, e) naked, and f) … well, you get the idea.

And now, as he knocked on the door of the only people who had ever shot out one of the show's cameras, like, _with a gun_, he couldn't help but feel as if there were an almost infinite number of possibilities awaiting him within. It also occurred to him that Murphy's Law suggested an infinite number of possibilities wasn't necessarily a good thing to have.

However, there was no time for further stalling, as Ted's knock was promptly answered by voices from within.

"Ugh… what the hell? Oh it's probably those queer guys."

"Mireille! That's not a very nice way—"

"Wait, I thought you were allowed to use slang to refer to your own minority?"

"Well… it's still kind of insensitive."

"Oh who cares? Anyway, speaking of sensitive…"

"…That's not me, Mireille."

"Oh… Oh!"

"Wait, you mean that wasn't—that whole time it was… EEEWW!"

"So… _Chloe's_ the one with the ticklish ears?"

"STOP TALKING ABOUT IT!"

"Hey, I'm not any happier about this than you are."

"I SERIOUSLY DOUBT THAT."

"Is anyone going to answer the door?"

"You're the one who's actually got clothes. Also the only one who _hasn't _been traumatized… for once."

"Fine, fine."

There was some further grumbling, and something that sounded like someone rhythmically chanting, "Must forget must forget must forget," and then the same voice continued: "All right, you two stay here, just don't try to kill each other while I'm—" There was a pause. "Chloe… put down the alarm clock. And Mireille, stop trying to chew your hand off. Your teeth are not that sharp—I would know. Now behave yourselves for five minutes, or I'll have to ask our guests to leave." Another pause. "I mean… I'll have to… not ask them to leave. I'll ask them to stay. FOREVER."

There came a series of noises which Ted Allen could only liken to those of a kicked dog, but in two-part harmony. Then there were some quick footsteps, and finally the door was opened, revealing a sleepy-eyed, brown-haired girl in a ridiculously gold tunic.

"Um… hi…" said Ted Allen, suddenly wondering if eavesdropping on someone who'd recently fired a gun in his general direction was rather unethical, and besides which stupid. "Er… I couldn't help but overhear," he said, suddenly wondering if telling someone who'd recently fired a gun in his general direction that he'd been eavesdropping was… you know. "Are you… having some sort of problem…?"

"What? No! Everything's fine! Why would you ask that?" the girl said, snapping upright the way some people snap off fish heads.

"It was just that—"

"Shut up! You're a very suspicious person! We may not be a 'normal,' family, and we may have our quirks, but we don't need your PITY! Good day, sir!"

Thus, for the second day in a row, Ted Allen found the door to this particular apartment abruptly slammed in his face, leaving him with little to do aside from blink and stare.

The only sound was that of angry, rapid footsteps growing gradually softer and softer… and then louder again.

Ted instinctively flinched away as the door opened, expecting swift death, or, at the very least, lengthy, drawn-out death. Instead, he was greeted by the same girl in the golden tunic, smiling pleasantly. A little too pleasantly. For someone who had just told him to get lost. "I'm sorry if I was a little on edge a moment ago. Please, won't you come in?" she said, with a look on her face of such sincerity and kindness that Ted Allen knew at once that he was doomed.

Nonetheless, as he stared and blunk, trying to think of an escape route which would allow him to fake his own death and so deter pursuers, he quickly remembered that none of those things were what he was paid for. Masterfully, he recovered by… accepting her invitation inside. Still, something didn't quite seem right… "Um… wh-what's that you have there?" he asked, as he stepped over the threshold.

"Huh? Oh this?" the girl raised her hand, in which was clutched a narrow, pointed object. "Nothing. A bookmark. Why, what does it look like?"

"Kind of like a shiv made out of a mattress tag and a hair scrunchie," Ted Allen admitted.

"Oh, that's silly!" said the girl, tossing the object in question over her shoulder. "Why would I have something like that?"

"Um…" began Ted Allen, several reasons springing to mind like springs. Mind springs.

"Anyway, did you happen to pick up those clothes we asked for?" the girl said before he could voice any of his theories, all but shoving him in the direction of the sofa. "Not that it's anything you haven't seen before at this point but—"

"Y-yes, I understand…" Ted cut her off. "Um… Carson…?"

At the mention of his name, Carson Kressley stepped forward into the room, leading the rest of the slightly confused crew. As for Kressley himself, he wore a particularly baffled expression, which was focused upon the several plastic bags he held. "Well… I went to the hottest fashion stores in Paris, assembling elegant, stylish outfits that would suit all of your complexions, body types, and hair colors—which, you might appreciate, was rather difficult for your purple-haired friend—but… for some inexplicable reason they seem to have morphed into a red top and black skirt, a hoodie with a t-shirt and miniskirt, and a black bodysuit with a green cloak as soon as I walked through the door."

"Like how any cassette left in a car long enough morphs into a 'Best of Queen' album!" said Jai Rodriguez.

"Actually, that's perfect," Kirika said, snatching the bags from Kressley. "We're already used to wearing these, so—"

"But that's not how the show is supposed to work!" cried Ted Allen. "We can't do a makeover show if we don't actually change anything!"

"It's almost as if there were some great, immutable law at work, dictating that nothing changes, at least, not permanently…" mused Kressley. "As if it was just easier and far less complicated if they always wore the same clothes, thus avoiding the need for anyone to try and envision new outfits for them."

"Yeah, that's just kind of how things go around here," said Kirika, shrugging. "You get used to it." And, with that bald-faced lie, she turned and strode from the room.

When the three Noir girls reappeared in the main room of the apartment, they were clothed in their traditional attire. This, unsurprisingly, made quite a lot of people unhappy.

"Wait, wait, you mean the cloak was for… um…" stammered Carson Kressley.

"Chloe."

"For Chloe?!" Kressley finished. "You have magenta-colored hair! _Why_ would you wear _green_?"

Chloe seemed to think about this for a moment. "Um… camouflage?"

"But your hair is _magenta_!" said Kressley.

"There's a lot of things that don't make much sense about Chloe," Mireille said. "For instance, did you know her ears—"

"BITCH I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!" screamed Chloe, lunging at Mireille from about 3 feet away, which, incidentally, isn't a distance where lunging is especially necessary. In any event, she was frozen in mid-lunge—quite literally—by a glare from Kirika, and promptly crashed to the ground, robbed of her momentum in a completely inexplicable fashion.

"…Was that one of the things that doesn't make sense about her?" asked Ted Allen.

"No, no that one was new…" Mireille said.

"Anyway, now that we're all here," began Jai Rodriguez, "let's get down to business! To defeat… the Huns!"

This time it was the Noir girls who stared blankly across the room at its other occupants, as if an explanation might be forthcoming if they simply emoted "What was that…?" hard enough.

"Oh, right…" said Ted Allen. "Um… Jai is sort of… our version of Chloe, I guess you could say. He's the show's pop culture expert. Our 'Culture Vulture,' if you will. He speaks in references."

Mireille sighed. "Why does that seem so very, very typical?" No one really had an answer to that, although they did find that they shared the feeling to an almost eerie degree. After a moment, Mireille continued, "Anyway, I hate to disappoint you, but I really don't think there's much point to doing this. You're all experts on _men's_ fashion, and we're… well, you were here yesterday."

"Yes, but you're also not straight," observed Ted Allen.

"Right, so it doesn't work _twice_."

"Actually, I think that means it cancels out," said Ted. "It's like multiplying two negative numbers. Normally, we, as gay men, give advice to straight men, which is, by the transitive property of sexuality, sort of like a girl giving advice to a guy on how to dress in a way to be attractive to girls, so… with you… um…" he paused, scratching his head. "Okay, wait. I can't do this in my head. Do you have any graph paper?"

"Well, we _had_ some…" said Mireille. "But I somehow doubt we'll be able to find it… we were just cleaning the other day, you see."

It was at that very moment that a full ream of graph paper, and an assortment of writing implements, suddenly came dislodged from the ceiling and fell to the table with a muffled thud. Everyone spent a good few seconds eying each other suspiciously, decided it simply wasn't worth the effort, and seated themselves for some intensive… sex-math. Which is a lot less fun than it sounds. For the record.

What followed was a period during which the only sound in the apartment was the furious scribbling of pens and pencils on paper (Mireille does math in pen. This is _usually_ a bad idea, but, rather like fighting in high-heeled shoes, she refuses to be broken of the habit no matter how many times it causes her to fall off of a ledge. There's a story behind _that_ particular incident, but it is a tale for another time), and the occasional muttered phrase: "So five gay men, carry the four…" "But then, by the transitive property of transsexuals…" "Then you divide the combined weight of the threesome by their height standing on each other's shoulders…" "And so you get three x-squared plus five x times y, divided by the time it took to do all this math…" And so on and so forth.

Finally, after perhaps a good fifteen minutes of this, Ted Allen exclaimed, "I've got it!" and leapt up from his seat. "It's all really quite simple—our sexual preferences run along the lines of heterosexual women, while yours run along the lines of heterosexual men, therefore the basic dynamic of the show's premise remains the same!" The other members of the fab five nodded their agreement.

"I hate to admit it, but he's right… X equals Y… and Y equals X," said Mireille, dejectedly tossing down her pen (her third—she had snapped several for failure to not make a single mistake. Somehow she'd managed to not get ink everywhere doing this, although she had been forced to endure several "maidens with black hands" jokes). "Kirika?"

"Oh, yeah, I got the same…" said Kirika. "Although I have an imaginary number for the percentage of how applicable their advice is… And I think you end up dividing by zero if you account for us all being pretty decidedly feminine."

"Huh…" said Mireille.

Kirika looked at Mireille expectantly for a moment, the latter returning her gaze with a quizzical expression. After a moment of this, she asked, rather louder than was necessary, "So, how did you do, Chloe?"

"Huh?" said Chloe, looking up from her paper for the first time since they sat down. "Oh… well… I didn't really know what you were all talking about, so I just drew a picture of a kitty," she said, smiling and holding up a crayon drawing of an orange and white cat.

"That's wonderful, Chloe!" Kirika said. "We'll have to put it on the refrigerator."

"R-really?" asked Chloe, her eyes shining with a kind of glee normally reserved for when she had just shanked someone in the kidney.

"Of course! It's a beautiful picture. I mean, your perspective may be a little basic and two-dimensional, but the sun smiling up in the corner there definitely makes up for it," she said, with a definitive nod. "Right, Mireille?"

It should be noted that, having lived as partner-assassins whose very lives depended on their ability to work as a team, and also as room/bedmates with a tremendous degree of unresolved sexual tension, Kirika and Mireille were quite practiced at reading each other's expressions, and could have entire conversations without exchanging a single word. In fact, so precise was their ability, that they once debated the relative merits of the various seasons of Star Trek in such a manner. The series of glances that were rapidly fired off in the time after Kirika said, "Right, Mireille?" played something like the following:

Kirika: Hey, back me up on this, would you?

Mireille: … Yeah that's not happening.

Kirika: Mireille! I know you don't like Chloe, but could you at least _try_ to be a little nicer, for me?

Mireille: I am. I'm not going for my Walther.

"Hey I heard that!" said Chloe, who the others seem to have forgotten was _also_ able to instantly communicate with a glance, and probably better at it than Mireille, but what else is new? "You wanna go?!"

"N-now Chloe, don't—" said Kirika, only for Chloe to rush past her, charging at Mireille with reckless abandon. Kirika sighed, and grabbed the end of Chloe's cloak, jerking the other girl to a halt. "Come on, let's go put your picture on the fridge," she said as cheerfully as circumstances would allow, dragging her captive towards the kitchen.

"I'll CUT YOU!" screamed Chloe, still running forward in a blind fury, her feet slipping uselessly along the floor, her arms flailing out in front of her, as she was pulled away from the scene by the makeshift leash about her neck.

"I-is that… normal?" asked Ted Allen, ever the first one to recover from stunned silence.

"If you don't know, I certainly don't anymore, Ted-chan," Mireille answered.

"R-right…"

And for a time, all was Silence II: The Unrequited Requieted. Well, all except for the occasional disgruntled murmur from the other room, but that's pretty much par for a sequel.

Next Episode:

With the arrival of the Queer Eye Guys, will all things just keep getting better? Can our heroines become _absolutely fabulous_? Or will they be doomed to be merely abnormally pretty but with no fashion sense (which is to say, they'll be anime characters)? And will their pad be stylin'? …People still say that, don't they? Oh God, I'm too young to not be sure if slang is still in use and have too much self respect to keep up with it!

Ahem. On the next Three's Noir-y, Too these questions… may actually be answered. Sorta like we _didn't_ do in this chapter. Kinda. Also we'll get back to the present whence began this flashback.

Next time, Three's Noir-y, Too: Confessions of an Interior Decorator. The Noir girls aren't the easiest people in the world to get along with, you know!

_Ending Note: Okay, so first off, some things from the past chapters…_

Mireille: _So… Mireille swaps between being aghast at/angry about the open-air bath kiss between Kirika and Chloe and… seeming to not know about it. We're just gonna say that she keeps forgetting… I didn't make any contradictory jokes! I don't know what you're talking about! Mireille's just that fail!_

"Who designed that outfit, Aurelia _Maximus_?": _A total nerd pun, because Aurelia is a Latin name derived from the word for gold, so it effectively means "golden (haired)." And maximus is Latin for "biggest," so… it's a joke because Kirika's tunic is, like… solid gold… yeah…_

_On to this installment!_

Opening Theme: _For those interested, there is apparently a long and short version of the Full House theme (I did at one point blow a portion of my life watching the show, but I only ever saw the short version)—this parody uses the short version and then follows it with the long version after the point where that one would end. _

Why didn't I get a line?: _Just sort of… poking fun at how I haven't identified speakers in those little "Noir…" bits at the beginning. I may begin to do so next chapter._

Ted Allen: _Yeah I know very little about the fab five, so I'm inventing personalities to go with what's called for by the story/what seems funny, and Ted Allen became the group leader for no particular reason. It's nothing South Park hasn't done before, which, frankly, is my excuse for half of what's in this fic._

"Any cassette left in a car long enough morphs into a 'Best of Queen' album": _In keeping with Jai Rodriguez speaking in references, this is a reference to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's __Good Omens__ in which this is precisely what happens to the Vivaldi recording a demon on his way to pick up the anti-Christ was hoping he could use to calm down. It is, suffice it to say, probably far funnier than anything I've written, and so alluding to it may not be in my best interest, but…_

"Three x-squared plus five x times y": _This would read 3xx + 5xy. As in the CHROMOSOMES of the people in the room at present! Yeah! Math humor! All right!_

_And that about wraps it up. I promise I will not sit on the _next_ fully completed chapter for months without uploading it, though really, HtGGRC needs some love about now, and that may get priority. But spring break is coming, so we shall see. Either way, expect a needlessly serious author note ramble about my turning 18. Hey, I've got to shove this stuff off on SOMEONE. It's the only way I can get back to being funny! Thanks for reading, and Happy Easter to those who celebrate it (and for my fellow Jews…at least Passover's only a week, right?). _


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